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NTL CoreTrustSeal Requirements

Supplementary information, links and documents for NTL's CoreTrustSeal application

Expertise & Guidance (R06)

R06: The repository adopts mechanisms to secure ongoing expertise, guidance and feedback-either in-house, or external.

Training Materials

The National Transportation Library serves as a central clearinghouse for transportation data and information of the Federal Government. The repository ROSA P is directly funded by the United States Department of Transportation as the national and central resource for past, current, and future transportation research. In 1998, the National Transportation Library was founded through the Transportation Eq. Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), and in 2012, the role of the library was expanded through Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) mandate. For more information on the legal laws and mandates that keep NTL in operation, please consult the section Legal and Ethical (R04).

NTL ensures that its training materials are preserved for current and future staff members within task specific LibGuide pages (https://transportation.libguides.com/), for reference. Many of these LibGuides are internal staff guides and not publicly viewable. These LibGuides were written, continuously updated, and reviewed by NTL staff to ensure that the proper steps and guidance are recorded for the wide variety of workflows that the staff performs. It serves as a refresher and resource for current staff but also ensures that knowledge is not lost during structural or staff changes.

Professional Development

NTL staff is active in various areas of professional development to ensure they stay up-to-date and at the forefront of innovation around repository and records management to best serve our community.

  • NTL has actively participated in the Transportation Research Board (TRB; https://www.nationalacademies.org/trb/transportation-research-board) by attending the annual meeting, serving and participating on committees, and preparing workshops and presentations. As the leading organization for transportation research, staying up-to-date on TRB is an important aspect of NTL’s work.
  • The Data Services team at NTL has been active in the Data Curation Network (DCN; https://datacurationnetwork.org/) community, attending webinars, trainings, and sharing our own experiences by hosting presentations.
  • The NTL Reference team is active in the Special Libraries Association (SLA)’s Transportation Community (https://sla.org/page/Communities), which the team was recognized for with the 2023 SLA Transportation Community Innovation Award.
  • NTL team members serve as members of working groups under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC)’s Subcommittee on Open Science (SOS). The groups that staff participate in are:
    • SOS Persistent Identifiers Subgroup
    • SOS Effective Data Management Subgroup
    • SOS Publications Subgroup
  • NTL has an active member who serves on the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology (OST-R) Data Strategy. Currently, there are no finalized documents for public view, but the timeline is set for full implementation by May 2025.
  • NTL is a member of the Federal Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) Consortium that is led by the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). This community allows NTL to learn from other federal agencies and their use of ORCID’s tools and integrations.
  • Two Data Services team members have been accepted to complete the University of Vienna’s Data Stewardship Certification Course, one having completed it in June 2023, and one completed in June 2024.
  • NTL recently requested eight additional entries be added to the Research Organization Registry (ROR), as we plan and implement ROR as another persistent identifier to link within our metadata (https://ror.org/). ROR is currently used in README documents created by NTL staff and is integrated with out DOI metadata. Staff additionally attends the monthly community meetings and other relevant webinars hosted by ROR.
  • Coordination and Participation in the National Transportation Knowledge Network (NTKN) (https://transportation.libguides.com/ntkn). The Coordination of the NTKN falls under our head reference librarian, but NTL staff members also lead two communities of practices (Cooperative Digitization and Data Curation) within the NTKN.

In-House Reference and Advisory Services

The repository provides the service Ask-a-Librarian, which is a virtual reference desk and knowledge base (https://transportation.libanswers.com/) that allows users to ask specific questions regarding the content within ROSA P. A team of three reference librarians receives these questions and can either consult or connect the user with the relevant expert within USDOT to ensure they receive a sufficient answer.